incrediBILL - 6:11 am on Oct 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

Twitter is kind of like the beginning of the Borg's collective consciousness. I think of I think of Twitter more like a human search engine at times. While Google may not be capable of dealing with semantics, the thousand+ followers I have are perfectly capable.

Granted it takes a little while to figure out how to get the maximum ROI from Twitter, but once you do it can be amazing.

If you live in states with wild weather or earthquakes then Twitter can be very helpful because the tweets fly the minute the ground barely shakes like a big human powered seismograph.

Therefore I have no need for Twitter at the moment. Don't know about the future though. But it stifles my long winded style

I don't look to have the entire conversation on Twitter, but more of a means to find out where the conversation I need is being held at the moment or the best place to have it. Nobody is going to discuss 100s of lines of code in Twitter but you can certainly use Twitter to find out the most appropriate place to do such a thing.

I've actually met some people I didn't know on Twitter that helped me resolve some head banging programming problem within mere minutes that wouldn't have happened on WebmasterWorld. While the level of expertise among some WebmasterWorld members is second to none, top notch talent, their availability and response times might be hours, days or even weeks. Compare that to Twitter where I threw a problem out there and had someone point me to the solution in mere minutes. I had already done exhaustive searching for hours in Google, Bing, several forums and came up with nothing yet a couple of tweets later I was pointed in the direction of a solution.

think the severe constraints on message size is a real plus

In a way it's kind of like the HTTP protocol, the short header sent out that ends with a much bigger resulting document.

The fluff issue is easy to deal with, just don't follow fluffy people :)

Coming from the Midwest where people deliberately like to make short stories long, using something like Twitter is kind of a smack upside the head for many to learn how to get to the point already!

I always made fun of my Midwest heritage by reversing "To make a long story short..." to my well known counter phrase "To make a short story long...". The first time I said that to my Floridian wife she said it didn't make any sense but has long sense changed her mind after listening to some of my relatives babble on endlessly without even stopping to catch heir breath as they jump from story to story and eventually return to and finish the original topic.